Victory Over Porn

At the age of eight, you stumble across porn in your older brother’s room. As you flip through the magazines, a range of emotions run through your head. But one thought yells the loudest: keep this secret. You carefully replace the magazines, never telling a soul. Unfortunately you never get the images out of your head. Fast forward a few years and a friend shows you a website, and another, and another. You’re hooked. Years later, and thousands of images later, you’re living a life of duplicity, unable to shake the darkness surrounding your heart. You’re lonely, ashamed, and unable to quit your porn addiction. Is there any hope?

Matt Fradd, executive director of The Porn Effect and Integrity Restored says yes, there is hope for all porn addicts. He offers a five-step battle plan in the fight against porn addiction. He says, “Too often people view recovery from pornography like an event instead of a process. There is no silver bullet. There is no one magic thing that you need to do to be free of this stuff. Instead it’s a daily, sometimes hourly choice. Five essential things for someone who wants to begin walking in freedom make up the battle plan: Prayer and Fasting, Accountability, Getting Informed, Counseling, and Perseverance.”

The Porn Effect Battle Plan combines all facets of recovery for a comprehensive strategy. Fradd says that for too long Catholics have been giving out simple prayer advice. They were simply ill-equipped to deal with the relatively new phenomenon of widespread porn addiction. He says he hears from recovering Catholics that have been asked, “Well, have you tried praying harder? You need to pray.” Fradd says that can be extremely unhelpful. He compares it to encountering a person exhibiting signs of clinical depression and asking them, “Have you tried praying harder? Have you tried meditating upon the Joyful Mysteries?” He concludes while you might ask them about their prayer life, you would also ask them if they were seeing a doctor or receiving counseling.

Accountability Partner

In a similar way, a person who is struggling with a porn addiction needs help beyond just prayer. One way is through an accountability partner. Why an accountability partner? Fradd says, “We need someone in our lives who knows us. Accountability is not so much about calling us out on our sin as it is about pulling us up to become the sorts of people that we want to be.” Fradd advises that a man suffering from a porn addiction ask another man and a woman suffering from a porn addiction ask another woman. The person you ask should share your definition of sobriety and agree with your morals as a Catholic. Fradd says, “An accountability partner is someone who is there to encourage you and walk beside you as a brother or a sister.” Fradd says an accountability partner is essential and the communication between the two does not need to be deep and exhausting. Fradd says, “We can have fun with it. And having fun with it doesn’t mean we’re lessening the severity of the sin. But it just means we’re finding a way to dialogue about this in a way that isn’t going to make us exhausted and not want to continue the conversation.” For instance, he’s heard of people taking out their accountability partner for lunch when they’ve fallen. Others have had bets to see who could go the longest. One even gave permission to his accountability partner to punch him as hard as he could when he’d fallen. The Porn Effect also hosts a forum for men and a forum for women for anyone who needs a starting place to reach out or ask questions.

Enter the Victory App

Fradd and Mark Hart of LifeTeen International want you to win the war against porn. That’s why they have just launched the new Victory App.  The app is free for download from Apple’s App Store (fundraising for an Android version is underway), and begin tracking your progress in the fight against porn. The passcode protected app sends you notifications and allows you to rate your progress. If you have a setback, it sends you to a page to assess your triggers. Fradd explains, “Porn is an escape behavior so when we’re feeling irritated or hurt, or rejected, or confused, or frustrated or overwhelmed we all turn to these escape behaviors to help us cope with that pain. Pornography is an efficient escape behavior that feels like it gives us help but then it kills us. It sends us into a pit of despair.” By tracking our triggers, we can recognize and work to avoid those pitfalls in the future.

The app has an accountability button which allows you to enter in the phone number of three accountability partners. Any time you’re feeling vulnerable, you can click that button, and three people will get a notification that says, “Please pray for…” Fradd and Hart were extremely happy to include this feature. Fradd says, “Imagine. You’re about to fall to pornography, you click this button and you know that three people are going to be contacting you shortly. If not immediately. To say, ‘Hey, how you doing? Just offered a prayer for you.”  Other features of the app include a calendar where you can view your victories, setbacks, and when you’ve been to confession.

Why Quit Porn?

For single Catholics, porn can prevent them from finding their future spouse. Fradd says, “The porn addict lives a life of duplicity. He presents himself or she presents herself as one particular person, like when he’s at church, or when she’s with friends, but then he or she goes home and looks at all sorts of horrific types of porn. Because the porn that we view today is very different from the porn we may have stumbled across as kids.” This double life starts working against a porn user’s ability to distinguish fantasy from reality. Fradd says, “It can be really hard. On the one hand, you really want to look at porn because it feels great, it’s a great escape, but on the other hand, you believe that people have intrinsic dignity and inalienable rights. How do these two live together? Well they don’t. Eventually one will suffocate the other.” This suffocation becomes a stumbling block to developing and keeping meaningful relationships.

Sharing the Truth

For those addicted to porn who are in a serious relationship, Fradd urges you to let your loved one know about your hidden truth. He says, “When a couple is in a committed relationship in view of marriage, I think justice demands that the other person know what they’re getting into.” Fradd explains that this doesn’t mean being explicit. He suggests saying something like this, “I need you to know that pornography is something I’ve struggled with since I was eight years old and on average it’s something I now view once a month, or once a week, and here are the things I’m doing to try to avoid looking at it.” He urges couples to have this conversation before marriage. He says, “No one has a right to know our sins, but the virtue of justice demands that we have this conversation. I can’t tell you the amount of wives that have come to me and said ‘I had no idea what I was getting into. He never shared this with me until after our marriage.’ That’s not what you want.”

Should I Stay or Walk Away?

Finding out that the person you are dating has a porn addiction can be devastating. Unfortunately, with the ease of accessibility from the internet, the chance of encountering this in our relationships has greatly increased. What should you do? Fr. Sean Kilcawley of the Diocese of Lincoln defines porn addiction as ‘when a person seeks comfort and a primary relationship with a thing instead of a person.’ Using that definition, Fradd believes there is a prudential call that needs to be made. He says, “If you’re with a person who is not showing any signs of recovery, is viewing porn on a regular basis, you might decide that person is not in a place where he or she should be dating.” He stresses the importance of asking the question: What is your plan to find freedom from this? A couple then can check back with each other and evaluate the success of a person’s recovery.  Fradd says, “There’s obviously a big difference and a distinction that needs to be made between the person that is incapacitated, in the sense that they might be viewing this every day, or more than once or twice a week. There’s a big difference between that and someone who’s fighting valiantly to be free and might be falling once a month, once every two months, once every three months.”

Freedom from Porn is a Daily Choice

Fradd believes freedom from pornography is possible. For those who feel like there is no hope, Fradd knows that feeling. He knows what it’s like to be sick and tired of being sick and tired. And the feeling that there is no way. He’s been there. But he also knows “that recovery from this stuff is possible because of the grace of God to do profound things in the human heart.”  But freedom takes perseverance. Fradd emphasizes, “Recovery is not something that just happens to us. It’s not an event. It’s a process. Freedom from sexual distortion is a daily choice.” He urges those suffering in the dark, “to remember the great mercy of God that no matter how many times we fall, how shamefully or criminally, we have a God who is infinite in mercy.” St. Therese of Lisieux compared God’s mercy and our sin to a drop of water being flicked into a raging furnace. Fradd points out that since God’s mercy is infinite and our sin is finite, the difference is far greater because there really is no comparison between the two. He says, “We should never fear returning again and again to His mercy as Pope Francis has said, ‘God never tires of forgiving us…we grow weary of asking for forgiveness.’ So we should humble ourselves and pick ourselves up each time we fall and trust in His mercy.”